Aaron Robinson: Why Train Kids to be "Grease Monkeys"? Because We Need Them

Out of 94 high schools in Los Angeles, only 13 still have active auto shops.

April 2012 By AARON ROBINSON

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The drive to Carson High School carries you past the fix-it shops, taco joints, weedy lots, and family-run panaderias and carnicerías that line the avenues in this part of blue-collar Los Angeles County. High cyclone fencing divides the 30-acre campus of rectangular cream-and-blue buildings into small warrens of activity as many of the school’s 2800 students stream outdoors for the lunch hour.

Robert Roach, Carson’s auto-shop teacher, has invited me to speak to his careers class about the thrilling world of car magazines. I bring a laptop with a PowerPoint presentation, a few back issues, and a bit of eye candy: a new, $93,000 BMW 650i coupe.

Roach’s classroom is basically a large garage filled with disemboweled engines and disassembled cars, mostly from the 1970s and ’80s. Desks and blackboards are situated to one side for the 40 or so students who pack each of his five classes. Some of the machinery and tools date to the 1960s. Wall diagrams explain the workings of breaker-point ignition distributors and pushrod valvetrains. There isn’t one modern computer scan tool in sight.

Interest in my talk waxes and wanes through the hour, but everybody perks up when I’m asked if we’re ever pulled over by the cops. After a few suitably embellished stories, we herd out to gawp at the BMW. Then the bell rings, and everybody scatters.

After 16 years as a special-ed teacher, Roach took over Carson’s automotive technical-arts program in 2010, becoming one of the few high-school teachers in the 919,930-student Los Angeles Unified School District who gives kids who are into cars at least one class to look forward to. Out of the 94 high schools in the LAUSD, only 13 still have auto shops.

Bill Yarnall, who taught Carson’s auto shop for 35 years before handing it off to Roach, remembers when every L.A. high school had one. Indeed, when Yarnall started teaching in the mid-’70s, Carson also had a wood shop, an electronics shop, a print shop, an upholstery shop, two metalworking shops, and courses in technical drafting. Yarnall had about 20 students per class, controlled a $2000 annual budget, and received new equipment every two or three years. The high-school shops weeded out the less keen and routed the remainder to the trade schools and the more advanced junior-college shops, which fed them to good jobs in industry.

Yarnall watched the system crumble. California school budgets were decimated by voter-approved tax changes, which hit the shop classes hard. In the mid-1990s, as teachers retired, their shops were shut down. Classroom head counts soared along with L.A.’s population, and the remaining auto shops came to be viewed as just large rooms in which to dump kids, especially those who were underperforming and needing courses they could pass easily.

Also, the emphasis in high-school education switched from preparing kids for adulthood in all its various forms to preparing kids solely to take standardized tests and go to college. Some school administrators cast a sneer toward shop classes and their manual-labor curricula. Roach, who now runs his classes on a $600 annual budget, describes the attitude as, “Why are we training our kids to be grease monkeys?”

Yet one thing remains consistent in the U.S.: “Not everybody is college ­material,” says Yarnall. “We still need technicians. We still need people who can fix things.”

Nobody knows that better than Winston Morgan, a technical trainer at nearby ­American Honda Motor Co. To help answer a desperate need for competent entry-level technicians—in other words, oil-changers who don’t forget to replenish the oil—he and a co-worker came up with Honda’s Explorer Program, a class for high-school kids that meets at Honda’s training center for three hours every Friday night.

It’s run on a minuscule budget and staffed by an all-volunteer crew. These mentors prepare the students over the weeks to take a grueling final exam in which they must troubleshoot and service a late-model Honda in half an hour. Besides torque procedures, they learn ethics, decision-making skills, and conflict resolution along the way.

The goal, says Morgan, is to feed prepared candidates directly into Honda’s Express Service program, a solid entry-level job that can lead to higher technical training, junior college, dealership management, or, as in Morgan’s case, even to a job at the head office. “Instead of working at Pizza Hut, you’re learning a skill,” he says.

Somewhere along the line, America forgot that getting paid to replace a clutch, weld steel, or work a lathe is as respectable a pursuit for a 21-year-old as earning an English degree or carrying an M-16 in Afghanistan. Germany hasn’t forgotten. There, a bedrock system of trade schools preserves the nation’s historic excellence in technical arts. Meanwhile, the country whose welders once built the Saturn V rocket is having trouble finding people who can change an oil filter.

The home of the Carson Colts sits on one corner of a busy intersection that also has a gas station, a Taco Bell, and a Jack in the Box. While administrators may dream of stellar test scores, some of their kids are dreaming of having an option other than college, the Army, or work across the street. Teachers like Roach and Morgan are struggling against the tide to give it to them.